Maybe you didn’t know that the money in your bank account is not to be trusted. At present it will buy certain things. No body on earth guarantees that it will buy anything for you in 5 years time. The States of Jersey £1 note merely confirms that it will is exchangeable by the States - at any time -for another £1 note.
Also in this book Mervyn King confirms “the severity of the disequilibrium into which so many of the biggest economies of the world have fallen.” The shaking financial foundations of most nations today are debt-related.
Given these two factors – “monetary and banking alchemy” and “severe disequilibrium of the world’s biggest economies” - Mervyn King places his faith in nothing except “the power of pessimism”. He hopes that those who see these things will be forced, by pessimism, “to undertake bold reforms” (p. 369). “A long-term programme for the reform of money and banking and the institutions of the global economy will be driven only by an intellectual revolution.” There ends the book – with hope placed in a human intellectual revolution when one of the most intelligent men sees only pessimism.
Separately, Jersey continues its barn-building industry. See bold above. Barns are places where wealth is stored. Today most wealth is represented and transferred intangibly. Money, investments, loans, certificates of deposit, contracts for differences, and titles to property are all intangible. These forms of wealth still need barns – arrangements to hold these titles to wealth.
Jersey’s financial services industry builds these barns often in the form of companies and trusts. Barn--companies own bank deposits and all kinds of assets. The trustees of a barn-trust are the legal owners of assets which actually belong (beneficially) to others. Jersey-based barns hold hundreds of billions of pounds worth of assets.
We help people by building their barns. And, at the same time, build and place into our own barns the money-profit from this building activity.
Jesus Christ was asked by “someone in the crowd” to assist him in “telling his brother to share the inheritance with him”. That seems perfectly valid. What can be wrong about that? Well, it seems that the danger for this “someone in the crowd” was that he might be succumbing to the “desire to have more”. But what’s wrong with being eager to have more?
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